The Revenge of Scobie

I used my blog for my random thoughts. Somehow, Facebook took that away, imploring me to post an update every time I opened the website. This was before there was an app, and indeed, it was before I knew apps existed. I still had a Blackberry at the time. I might be out of practice with my random thinking but I'm going to give it the old college try. Today I was ironing very tiny folds on my quilt seams, and I thought of the word painstaking, which is what it was. And it occurred to me that painstaking is not a combination of pain and staking, it's a combination of pains and taking. One is taking pains to do something in a particular way, usually the right way, or the hard way. This is a corny extension of my thinking: the opposite of taking is giving and the opposite of pain is joy, so something which is painstaking is also really joygiving, but we don't talk about endeavors that are joygiving. Ironing the tiny folds of my quilt square seams is both painstaking and joygivi...

 In high school, I became friends with a kid named David Lantham Reamer. He was just about as cranky as you can imagine someone would be who had to hear "Reamer? I hardly know her!" on a daily basis. We used to drive around in his Honda Civic, sharing cigarettes with the windows rolled down even on the coldest nights, listening to the mixtapes he was an expert at making. Not just song choice, either. He made elaborate tape cases with liner notes written in tiny letters in his distinct handwriting. He wrote me lots of letters too, typed out in lower case or spaced all over the place sometimes, in the manner of his favorite poets, ee cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He wrote poetry and took lots of photographs with an old Canon.  Before he died, he was a photographer. Specifically, he was a food photographer  and a damn good one. Before that, he was a chef. He did some other stuff too, but the main thing he did was collect really cool stuff. He had a voracious appetite f...

  I started this blog for no other reason than I cannot remember the login information for my old blog  St. Scobie's Mock Whiskey . I've got other blogs (one on Medium, one for work) but none scratch the writing itch quite the way St. Scobie does. The other blogs have so many rules - some written, some internal - and I missed having someplace to say whatever I want. Not that my posts are all that radical. It's more likely that they are too silly or unprofessional for my other blogs. The writer part of me wants to stop being so self-critical, to stop pre-editing before I even say anything. I guess this blog is an effort to avenge myself. You can read about the origin of St. Scobie here .

 I made my first quilt during my law school winter break on my mom's sewing machine. I wanted to learn how to sew Cutting up three polyester skirts into squares and sewing the squares back together seemed like a good way to learn. This is my first quilt, born in December 1997. I've made four more quilts since then. I am not an expert. Making quilts is very easy and very gratifying, however, so I thought I would demystify the process and offer some tips on how to make a quilt. You will need a sewing machine if you want to finish a quilt in a reasonable time frame. You will need fabric, but it can be from anything: clothing, sheets, fabric scraps you found at a garage sale or fabric store. Gee's Bend quilters used everything they had on hand. I recommend that you get a "self-healing" cutting mat and a rotor cutter to cut the fabric, as well as fabric shears. You'll need a spool of thread, obviously. You will need an iron. Three-quarters of the way through your ...